


the unimaginable light you hold inside

by UntemperedWolf



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Mild injury hurt, Nine is so broken but so in love with rose, Their love is pure, i made myself cry writing this, it's mostly emotional hurt/comfort, not because it's angsty but because they're so in love, rose comforts nine, rose is Nine's light, rose is his saviour, there is a mention of a war (not just the time war) but it doesn't go into detail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 10:18:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18247838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UntemperedWolf/pseuds/UntemperedWolf
Summary: But Rose…Rose is so bright, so young, and so pure. She’s not dark, or evil, poisonous or broken. He may deserve to be here, to see these horrors and to be brought right back to his own war, to be tormented, but Rose doesn’t.And yet, because of him, Rose is here.And she’s suffered.





	the unimaginable light you hold inside

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic a short while ago and since then has been procrastinating posting it, but on the 14th anniversary of Doctor who coming back in 2005, I thought it was fitting to actually get around to posting it!!! The title is from Light by Sleeping at last!
> 
> I'm incredibly proud of this fic, so I hope you enjoy!!

The day had started out ordinary. He had gotten up, way before Rose, as per usual. She was human, and humans waste so much time with their sleeping habits, and Rose was no different. Actually, the way she treated sleep, you’d think it was something holy.

He, on the other hand, rarely needs to sleep. And even on the times he does, he doesn’t always. Time Lords can go a long time without sleep—yes, they can sleep more if they so desire, and that’s not uncommon for them. Time Lord’s dreams are vivid, much more vivid than humans, and they remember their dreams with more clarity. Many an invention has come out of Time Lord’s dreams; they see it as a time for their mind to be undisturbed. Still, the Doctor is always moving, and sleep requires you to be still.

And nothing good ever comes out of his dreams.

The Doctor merely shuts his eyes for an hour or so, resting his body—they had been running an awful lot recently—but not trying to rest his mind. That’s when the nightmares come.

Everything had been normal that morning. He’d been making repairs in the TARDIS, mooching around and passing time until Rose would rise. Or, until it’s more an acceptable time to come wake her up. He doesn’t do that often, too cautious of his companion’s privacy, but he had occasionally when he thought too many hours had passed with no sign of Rose. That usually happens after a long stint of running with no rest, and the TARDIS’ health monitors often inform him that she needed a rather long rest to recuperate. She is only human after all.

Rose doesn’t leave him alone for long, not really, never any longer than ten hours, and that’s only occasionally. Depending on when they run into trouble, she can go twenty-four hours, sometimes longer, with no substantial rest.

Still, he finds his feet itching, wanting to run straight into the next adventure, distract his mind from his looming, dark thoughts. Those eight, nine, ten, hours stretch out long, spanning for what feels like an eternity. The last few hours are the worst. He knows, when it passes hour six, that if he was to go into her room, wake her up and tell her to get ready, she would.

No, that’s not right, she would regardless of the hour. Oh, she would complain, if it was too early. His companion doesn’t shy away from voicing her complaints, but he could tempt her with beautiful descriptions of burning stars, of solar flares, of once in a million chance to see a space tidal wave. Rose, oh Rose, she’s good like that. Tales of the stars lure her, tempt her, call to her as they do to him.

And most importantly, Rose is loyal. She’s kind, and compassionate and has a gentle soul; a heart made out of gold. She’s intuitive, far too intuitive sometimes, and the Doctor often feels like she can see right through him, with no real effort. It’s something that simultaneously makes him feel like dropping all of his closely guarded walls and making them thicker, layered.

So if he was to march into her room, interrupting the sleep she cherishes so dearly, she would complain, but she’d do it with no hesitation. She’d do it with an understanding, he thinks. The Doctor isn’t being rude, he’s being…vulnerable.

The Doctor doesn’t like examining this too closely. The thought that Rose, this one human girl, has such a silent understanding about him scares him. He’s war-torn, scarred from the war, his loss, and his actions. He’s vulnerable, a shivering child lost and hidden beneath walls and walls, more vulnerable than ever before. He shields himself away but Rose, her light and warmth, it shines through the cracks.

He’s lost everything, yet with Rose by his side, he feels like he’s gained everything.

She helps him in more ways than he thinks she knows; he doesn’t even know, afraid of acknowledging the power of her presence. So he gets on with his day, lurking behind his walls, acknowledging Rose’s importance to him, but never allowing his mind to analyse too closely—never allowing him to analyse why, from Rose’s perspective, she understands him so well. He has enough trouble from his own feelings to bring hers in the mix.

An acknowledgment that they are important to one another is enough, for anything more might bring upon more heartbreak than he has already suffered.

So, it’s not a debate of whether Rose _would_ get up, if he so demands it, but rather if she _could_.

Humans of Rose’s age need an average of nine hours of sleep, especially ones with an intense life as they lead. Still, much like Time Lords—although, unfortunately not too similar, humans can function on less than the average sleep.

This means, he _knows_ , when it passes the sixth hour, that if he was to go into her room, wake her up and tell her to get ready, she _could_.

The Doctor doesn’t.

Oh, he entertains the thought. In fact, for the ten hours, especially as it hits that hour six, it’s his most prominent thought, going over and over in his mind. A broken record, set to repeat. It’s how he occupies his mind, dreaming up the scenario again and again, of him walking into her room, awakening her from her slumber.

The Doctor thinks the Time Lords would despair if they could see him now and know his mind. He’d be a laugh, a joke. The Last of the Time Lords using his incredible, vivid mind, to dream up the same, lame desperate scenario. He’d be an embarrassment. Time Lords thought themselves superior and here he is, relying so heavily on a human. In his darker moments, he thinks himself in this self-deprecating way. Or rather, he should say, since he always seems to find himself lost in this mindset of self-loathing, in his lighter moments, he doesn’t think of this as true. The Time Lords, he knows, were heavily flawed beings and the way they’d think of his life would be wrong. Not only, but mostly for the way they’d view Rose.

They’d call Rose fragile, a weak shell but the Doctor knows this is not true. Rose is anything but fragile. Calling her fragile is like calling her a victim, and Rose has shown him time and time again that this is not the truth. Rose is strong. She’s the strength to his weakness, the light to his dark.

Rose is… Rose and that’s why, no matter how much he entertains the thought, no matter how much he feels alone, he doesn’t carry out the much dreamt up scenario in reality. That wouldn’t be fair to Rose, especially when he knows how willingly she’d do it.

Instead, he meddles with the TARDIS, reads some books in the library, trying to think up new and exciting places to take Rose—anything to pass the time until Rose awakes and eases him out of his lonely, dark mind once again.

Almost as much as Rose loves to sleep, she loves a cup of tea too, so the Doctor always hears her movements in the galley first. The TARDIS is an infinite ship, with walls that betray no sound, not like a house, but the Doctor requests she places the galley close to the console room, and filters the sound from there, to give him an early alert of Rose’s movements.

It acts as a way to relieve him of the endless night quicker, but also provides a warning to him, a reminder to compose himself behind the cool, unaffected wall he hides behind—stopping him throwing himself at her, embracing her into a tight hug every morning. Despite how it scares him not to mind how she sees his vulnerability, he draws a line at showing her that much.

Just like every morning—oh, how domestic the Doctor’s life had become—Rose has shuffled into the console room, a cup of tea still in her hand (despite his rules against food and drink in the console room). It’s not often she’s dressed, in outside clothing—a rarity, in fact, since she had come aboard permanently—but what layers she has on varies. Either she’d be wearing her, as she called them, “lazy clothes,” which were the clothes she often climbed into after a day’s adventure but before bed. Or sometimes she’d come in, still in her flannelled pyjamas.

This day she had come in, dressed still in her pyjamas, a sleepy look to her eyes. The Doctor had been travelling with Rose now for quite a while, enough to be able to read her. That look meant that she wanted a quiet day, somewhere there’d truly be no chance of trouble. The Doctor had just spent ten hours thinking of places to take her, so his mind had quickly landed on the perfect place, which he was quick to tell her. Rose, obviously liking the plans, had brightened up at them, and after placing the cup of tea on the grating—to a roll of the Doctor’s eyes—she had left the room to get ready.

However, any chances of a peaceful, calm day had gone out of the window almost instantly after she came back, dressed. Alarms were going off, meaning the universe clearly had different plans for them. _Trouble_.

The Doctor, trying to quickly get the TARDIS on course, flashed an apologetic look at Rose, guilt flooding his systems. It was eased, however, by the look of excitement upon Rose’s face.

Now, nineteen hours later, the Doctor’s guilt was back with an abandon, his mind letting his dark thoughts of self-loathing run unfiltered through him. Trouble barely scratched the surface of the mess they walked into.

They had landed in a war, a planetary war in some galaxy. A vicious, and dark war that had scraped up the planet’s surfaces, had contaminated the planet’s atmosphere with vicious gases from their weapons.

They had been there nineteen hours, although it felt like longer—wars always do make time feel slower, and they had been through horrors. The planet was calling for help, but none of the people trusted them, the help they had been calling for, when they came. It was that lack of trust which got people killed and lead him to be injured. They were back now, in the TARDIS, the fight far from over, but their help had been given and the planet’s need for them ceased. The fight now is left only to words, as the two factions try to piece their broken planet back together.

Pain resonates through his body, but it’s the pain of his mind, his guilt, that causes the most agony. His soul is dark, torn and broken. He tries to be happy, to accept that he needs to keep living, but he knows he doesn’t deserve it. If he was being honest with himself, he deserves to be here, in a place of war.

But Rose…Rose is so bright, so young, and so pure. She’s not dark, or evil, poisonous or broken. He may deserve to be here, to see these horrors and to be brought right back to his own war, to be tormented, but Rose doesn’t.

And yet, because of him, Rose is here.

And she’s suffered.

Because of him, she has seen horrors beyond her imagination. This place, this planet, is a dark place; the true grittiness of war. Nothing washed over or romanticized, here. She had stood beside him, looking at the horrors, and he had seen her eyes. Full of sadness, full of despair at the sights she saw.

Guilt is ever so prevalent in his mind, and no more now than before.

“Here,” Rose interrupts his thoughts, and he’s alerted that she’s back in the room with him. As soon as he was injured, Rose had wanted him back in the TARDIS, wanted to make sure he was okay, but he wouldn’t leave the planet until their help had been given to the fullest.

Now, he lies on his bed. Rose had first taken him to the TARDIS’ infirmary, and he had talked her through things. He wanted to be alone. He hadn’t wanted to be so vulnerable in front of her, but Rose is stubborn, and wouldn’t leave his side. It would’ve been fruitless sending her away, anyway; he can not treat himself alone.

After she helped him get bandaged up and had gotten the right medication for him, he had told her she had done enough. That she should get some rest herself after the day they had. But Rose’s stubbornness came out, and she told him she wasn’t leaving him alone. She had helped him to his bedroom, the TARDIS having helpfully placed it close by. And true to her word, she didn’t leave him.

That is until his stomach growled.

He turns to look at Rose. Rose has changed out of the battered clothes she wore out, and into her “lazy” clothing, her hair tied back loosely. She stands at the side of his bed, holding a tray, a warm smile upon her face. She places the tray by his feet, at the end of the bed, and if he wasn’t in pain, he’d complain.

Rose, wordlessly, then walks around to the other side of his bed, climbing onto it. Once sat on the bed, she pulls the tray towards her. The scene is oddly domestic, and if guilt wasn’t dominating his thoughts he would notice how it pulls at his hearts, warming him inside.

“Now, then. It’s time for your next dose of medicine, so you can take that, and then you can eat,” Rose instructs, authoritatively. “I made soup!” She adds, with a smile, somehow filled with joy despite their day. Her words reveal proudness, happiness, and pride shining in her eyes. Despite himself, the Doctor smiles back.

Rose places his pills in his hand, her touch gentle. She then holds out a glass of water. “Okay, you know the drill,” She tells him. If he was alone, perhaps he wouldn’t take the medication, reveling in the pain he feels from his injury—he deserves to feel pain. But he’s not alone, so he takes the pills with no complaints.

Rose yet again moves the tray, so she can shift closer to him. “Okay, can you manage, if I put this on your lap?” She asks him, her expression unsure. He nods, knowing it will only cause him nothing but mild discomfort. She smiles and moves the tray.

“I made chicken soup and cut up some bread. I didn’t know if you’d like that… but that’s always how Mum made this for me when I was ill,” Rose tells him, leaning gently against the pillow.

“It’s good,” the Doctor tells her after a bite. Silence falls between them as he eats. Silences between them have always been comfortable, and this is no different, yet there’s a slight tension in the air, he can feel it.

“I also brought you some of your books, I thought you might want to read since you refuse to sleep,” Rose holds up the books, lifting them from the tray. The Doctor nods, an acknowledgment, and silence falls once more.

Finishing the soup—and the Doctor has to admit, Rose was right when she told him a bit of food will make him feel better, physically at least—he places the tray on the floor. Rose could take it back to the galley, but the Doctor doesn’t want her to leave him. And, while he feels less like a coward, he has something to say. He turns his body slightly, to face her.

“Rose, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to see that today,” He apologizes, the words spoken lowly, almost gently. They betray his guilt, his voice sounding mournful, but the Doctor pushes away his alarm bells of getting too vulnerable. Rose needs an apology.

Rose remains quiet for a few minutes. “It wasn’t nice,” when she finally speaks, her tone is cautious like she’s carefully picked what words to use. “The universe isn’t all delights and wonders, I know that—we’ve seen that before. And today, today was…it was dark,” she continues to speak, carefully. Her voice is filled with emotions, and she’s not looking at him. Her hand moves from her lap, finding his arm and stroking down it, gently, until she finds his hand. She links their fingers.

“But,” She looks at him, her eyes finding his, “But I’m concerned for you. How are…you? That wasn’t nice for me, and I’m not saying what I saw today isn’t going to have an effect on me, but…I’ve never seen a war before. You have, and. It must’ve brought back stuff, yeah?” Rose’s eyes are filled with nothing but concern, but compassion. Guilt rampages through his mind, but with her look, it cuts through it, pausing the guilt.

His desire, his want to be vulnerable, to lower those walls he holds flares up and he goes to push the desire away, only to let it filter through in controlled amounts, but he realises. After the day he’s had, and how warm, welcoming and understanding her eyes are, he doesn’t have to—he doesn’t want to.

A lump forms in his throat. He tries to form words, but is unable, instead nodding in response to Rose. He shuts his eyes, begging the tears that have pricked to go away. Rose squeezes his hand, and her other hand resumes the stroking of his arm, a repetitive action, up and down.

The Doctor doesn’t know how much time passes before he speaks, losing himself in the gentle, soothing action of Rose’s comfort. “I saw…I saw so many of my people die. I saw children die, helpless children who… being there brought it all back. It’s always there, in my mind, I can’t ever let myself forget. Not when I survived, and they didn’t.” The Doctor flinches at how broken, how raw his voice sounds.

He feels the bed move and he opens his eyes again to see Rose shifting towards him even more, pulling at his arm. She moves it so she’s holding it against her, one hand still in his and the other securing him to her. Her expression is sorrowful, her eyes filled with pain—pain for him. She doesn’t say anything.

“I didn’t deserve to survive, not when I was the one who ended the war. Not when all I’ve done since it is put you in danger, taking you away from safety, under the lure of seeing beauty.” Rose makes him want to be open, honest with his thoughts. Maybe, he thinks darkly, if he voices them she’ll finally realise how much of a danger he is.

“Doctor,” Rose’s voice is soft, pained. “Doctor, listen to me, wars? They have to end, and that means making a hard decision. But that doesn’t mean that you didn’t deserve to survive, because you did. Everyone deserves to survive; it’s tough to see that when you’re the only one to, but don’t ever say you didn’t deserve it. That’s survivor’s guilt. And as for me? You didn’t force me to come here, and you don’t force me to stay. I came, and I stay because I want to. Because, yeah, I’ve been through things I wouldn’t back on earth, but I’ve also seen things, beautiful things, I wouldn’t’ve otherwise. And it’s not like my life on earth has been nothing but good, cos it ain’t been, so you haven’t ‘taken me away from safety’.” Rose squeezes his arm tighter.

“And do you know why I stay? And it’s not for the beauties of the universe, although that is an upside, it’s because of you. This life, it’s wonderful and I’m so glad I’ve been able to see it all out there—but if it was anyone else but you offering this life to me? Nah, I wouldn’t be here. That’s just down to you,” Rose’s words are sincere, her voice flooded with all kinds of emotions—the Doctor daren’t name them. Tears are once again brought to the Doctor’s eyes, but this time they’re because of Rose, because of how… how unbelievable she is.

He brings his hand, the one not tangled in hers, to her face. He has to shift uncomfortably to do so, pain shooting through him, but he bares through it. “Life seems a lot more worth living when you’re in it,” the Doctor allows for one moment of unfiltered truth, his words spoken softly but honestly, his expression unguarded. He allows those rarely acknowledged emotions, the feelings he holds for Rose, to be displayed openly on his face, in his words.

Rose is his light, his guide through the darkness. She’s his world, the Doctor knows that only too well, and he wants her to know. To know that there would be no other person he ever goes back for twice, no other person he’d want to have by his side at all times, no other person he misses as much as he misses her, even when she’s by his side.

He doesn’t say this all to her, yet he thinks she understands. She always does.

It’s why he loves her.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Comments and kudos are always appreciated.


End file.
